Start liking it. As the middle class in the West is picked clean and tossed away, Moloch will need something else to eat.
If Marx teaches us nothing else, he teaches us that everything id downstream of technology and economics. The state of technology determines what choices are possible; economics determines what choices are feasible. If technology makes a restaurant possible, a rich man can have anything on the menu. A poor man must budget. A housecat can plump out on "Tender Vittles". A feral cat must hunt or find a trash can.
Taken to its logical conclusion, this instrumentalist worldview is sociopathic. Thing is, Marx is wrong about a lot of things, but this time he is right, and on a larger scale even than Machiavelli. What both had in common is that sought to describe accurately *how* *the* *real* *world* *actually* *works*, how the princes really act, regardless of their fine-sounding justifications and the glib propaganda produced by their smirking courtiers.
This is the real reason that Marx, or at least his worldview, is opposed to the worldview of Christ. Not because the Frankfurt School tried to offer cultural (as opposed to economic) explanations as to why The Revolution hadn't happened yet, but because Christ saw people as something other than instrumental, as tools to be judged by their usefulness, as props in a play or greyhounds to be killed if they can't make the cut.
You get no earthly rewards for treating humans and cats as you would wish to be treated. Quite the contrary. In fact, the people of wealth, power and influence are but glorified sociopaths and behave accordingly (or they would soon lose their high places), but even so, many will die peacefully in their beds, loved and celebrated by many. They got their rewards. They got The Goodies up front.
Rathe, Christ teaches us to follow Him, even though our earthly goals are furthered by treating others as means for us to achieve our ends, even though the earthly consequences of following Christ (whether you use that specific term or not) are temptation, mockery and suffering.
If you think about it, if the Real World really is all there is, to follow Christ is insane. No wonder The Way is narrow, that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.....
I see no reason to believe that you get no earthly rewards for treating human beings or cats as you would wish to be treated. I think you do. But it depends on what kind of rewards you are looking for. For many years, I have gotten many earthly "rewards" for treating others the way I would like to be treated, even saying "thank you" to my three year olds when they did something for me, for example. Why not ?
I don't know what "the real world" is. Not knowing what the "real world" is has tremendous advantages : it gives YOU a tremendous amount of liberty in your daily actions, and it gives the people you enter into contact with the possibility of... doing what they like, assuming THEIR FREEDOM (which is the freedom that Christ was talking about...) in person to person contacts (not official, institutional ones...).
One thing that I have found over all these years is that my attitude makes many people respect and/or fear me. This has its advantages AND.. its disadvantages.
But since Jesus's ministry was so centered around freedom, it is important to remember that all freedom comes with a price, and with the ultimate question : are you willing to pay the price for that freedom ?
I get what you are saying, but they, "the people of wealth, power and influence" are not loved and they don't all die in their beds (see Epstein, though I suppose he was, in their world, nothing more than a pool boy). It seems, from our vantage point, that they are living well, but my guess is they are, for the most part, miserable - comfortable, yes, rich, yes, but ultimately miserable.
And, the real world is the world of Christ. Just because so many people miss that fact doesn't mean it isn't true.
One phrase comes to my mind as the most pertinent one about sacrifice ; it comes from Allegri's "Miserere" which I listen to often. The text must be very old, and I don't know who is speaking, but it is not essential. The speaker says at one point that the sacrifice that (the Christian) God wants is a repentant heart. That speaks to me radically. The repentant heart was meant to blot out a great deal of those smoking, bloody animal sacrifices in various temples all over the world, including in the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. The sacrifice of a repentant heart, coupled with Jesus's sacrifice in his bloody physical death by crucifixion, and Mary's trial at seeing her child suffer and die before her are the sacrifices that the Christian world offers in replacement of the old ways. The institution of the Catholic Church constantly reactualized Christ's sacrifice in the ceremony of the Mass. Very important.
That said... it seems to me that we are witnessing the birth of a new religion that is emerging from scientific scepticism. This has been coalescing maybe since the 19th century, the century that gave us the word "ecology", a modern construction from Greek etymons/roots. I don't like this religion at all, but what is emerging seems religious to me in its goals, and in its attempt at universal ? colonisation. Will it constitute... a transcendance ? Is it already attempting to constitute a transcendance ? It's funny how fast ideas can flip-flop in the Internet age.
Colonisation goes way back. The ancient Greeks were colonising, and the spread of their culture, their language is deeply responsible for where we are right now.
Speaking of the Greeks, and the Athenians... maybe some people here know that the cynicism, the hopelessness about corruption in democracy can be seen in Aristophanes, so there is nothing new about it, even if we would like to think that technology is radically changing us.
And on democracy : years ago, Konrad Lorenz wrote a book called the ten ? capital sins of capitalism, and he speculated briefly about democracy, comparing it to the phenomenon of schools of fish where identical individuals were grouped together in masses/schools, and maintained an identical distance between each other. In the school of fish there are no couples, no sexual reproduction between two partners, and no "child rearing" because there is no.. individual identity among the.. individuals.
Is the god who is tormenting us Moloch or... Dionysos ?
Probably Moloch is more straightforward than Dionysos. Dionysos is the god of the theatre, of wine... spirits, we could say. When he gets hold of people, they go berserk.
"All the world's a stage"... that is Dionysos' world. God help us when the theatre is everywhere BUT on the stage.
...
For sure, the slavery issue is sending us berserk right now. Trying to figure out who is a slave and who isn't, and hoping that WE aren't secretly slaves...
I am watching my kids raising their little ones, and it is hard sometimes. I have tried telling them that there is a world between saying "thank you" to a child who does something that you have asked him to do, or something that pleases you, and saying "bravo". There is a world of difference between the two responses, and the slavery issue is a big part of it, in ways that we have a hard time seeing.
If any of the Greek gods have power over us now, it would be Apollo, and Hephaestus,... and Athena. Dionysus is less the god of wine that the god of fecundity, resurrection, and renewal. Like Osiris, Dionysus was rent asunder, but he was *born again*. Dionysus is the god of frenzy, intuition, emotion, and visceral feeling, NOT of mind. We are so cerebral today: we are such egotists, that we are practically robots. Dionysus is the antidote to this, as are the saints of crazy wisdom, and holy fools. I can imagine Dionysus and Christ sitting down together and agreeing on most things. Christianity today is very little Christian. As David Bentley Hart stated in one of his articles, Christianity was never the religion of America, America was always the religion of America. Just look to American Catholicism, particularly as represented by groups such as Word on Fire, which put out repugnant videos on "God and gaming," and wholeheartedly adopt the consumeristic mentality. The Christ that many Christians worship today may very well be not Christ, but the anti-Christ. Chesterton hinted at this in some of his essays. Vladimir Solovyov and Philip Sherrard were more explicit; and Georges Bernanos, the great Catholic writer, came right out and said what needed to be said, namely that we are now idol worshipers in the grossest possible manner, with money and the Machine as our idols. In my recent (as yet unpublished) work on the Machine, and anti-Machine theology, I have been asked numerous times "does the Machine have agency?" to which I would respond yes, the Machine is one particular manifestation of the anti-Christ. Satan can be loved; Satan has a divine purpose; Satan, according to much mystical theology was a great lover of God and the greatest of monotheists, ... but the anti-Christ is an aberration, it is abnormal, a cancer upon the world, and the form it takes is the Machine. The antidote to the Machine is true religion, because true religion must always be anti-Machine. As Lawrence wrote "Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or much dry bread with Jesus, but don’t sit down without one of the gods." This is the hardest thing of all, since it puts one at odds not only with the secular materialist atheists, but also with the lower-case "o" orthodox religious of all faiths who nominally practice, but in reality have hearts filled with hubris, self-love, and an addiction to technology. We need to move away from progress, not automatically, not mechanically, but creatively, and in tune with the wisdom gleaned from trees, fairies, all the great Gods, and the primordial Fire that is beyond being.
The idea of worshipping idols is one that stems from pagan rituals of parading "GRAVEN IMAGES", statues that could be seen, through the streets in processions, for example. There is a link in most people's minds between the act of seeing, and images, graven images. (Writing is a graven image, by the way...)
The Jewish God is particular to the extent that He manifests himself as a voice, not as an image to be SEEN. Perhaps some people could be tempted to think that anything that doesn't take the form of an image to be seen could escape from the idolatry problem. What IS the idolatry problem, by the way ? I don't think it can be reduced to the devil, money and the Machine. I speculate that the idolatry problem arises from the temptation to circumcise, to encase the divine as movement into a static form, whatever that form may take. Life as dynamic, movement, becoming, refuses to be limited to a form that englobes it, and makes it static. I believe that the Jewish God, as he is "evoked" in His name in the Tetragram is life itself as dynamic, and unpredictable movement.
Maybe what the Jews did NOT foresee ? was that they could not escape this temptation by blotting out the WRITTEN (image...) name of God in their writing, and refusing to pronounce the Tetragram in speech. Even when Man finds crafty solutions to wiggle out of his temptations... the corruption of the best engenders the worst.
I find it capital that we reason with so many oppositions : can we do otherwise, but opposing Christ/Anti-Christ, heart/mind, intelligence/emotion, inner/outer, mechanical/creative, I want to question these oppositions, and why we want to oppose.
>As Lawrence wrote "Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or much dry bread with Jesus, but don’t sit down without one of the gods." This is the hardest thing of all, since it puts one at odds not only with the secular materialist atheists, but also with the lower-case "o" orthodox religious of all faiths who nominally practice, but in reality have hearts filled with hubris, self-love, and an addiction to technology.
Thank you so much for writing this part. I've recently moved to converting to Orthodoxy having never learned much about Christianity, and the nominal practitioners are the hardest thing to overcome as someone who still has doubt in their heart.
May your creativity and divine love continue to burn within you.
Have you read "The Immortality Key" by the Jesuit lawyer Brian Muraresku? He has some fascinating arguments around the influence of Dionysian mythologies on Christianity. Drugs too. Loads of drugs.
I'm glad you liked it. I have it in several versions, but the one that I like the best is the A Sei Voci version where you can hear it first in baroque, with freestyle improvisation in all the voices, and at the end, in the crystallised version that it ended up becoming when Mozart heard it in the Vatican chapel ? and wrote it up to make it... public for posterity.
Ginsberg's poem 'Howl' really hit me in the gut when I first read it, back in the early 60s. I've just had my own book about this subject published - it's called 'Village Building at the End of the World', and covers into much the same material as Paul's essay series on 'The Machine' (I hope it's OK to mention it here). I've referred to Rudolf Steiner's work on the old Zoroastrian 'devil', Ahriman, as an embodiment of the 'dark force' that's behind all this - I think it works very well as a symbol for the relentless tenacity with which it is trying to pull us downwards into a kind of zombie state - to replace the Human with the robotic, and turn the human spirit into a nightmarish simulacrum of itself. I agree with Paul that the best way we can meet this threat is to 'turn away from the Machine in our own hearts and minds, one human soul at a time'.
One thought in relation to the business of revolution: as I read Tom Holland's _Dominion_ I was struck by the fact that the Age of Revolutions does NOT begin in the late 18th century, but rather goes back far earlier, and is to be associated with Christianity. My sense is that once Christianity has taken root, then you have a repeated revolutionary impulse, an attempt to realise heaven on earth; the French / Russian / etc. revolutions are simply continuations of the tradition (and revolutions of this kind seem to me conspicuously absent in antiquity).
Also, when I read 'what does Progress want?', I immediately thought 'peace.' I think this answer would be given on a common-sense level by many, and it has roots in the liberal-enlightened tradition (e.g., Kant's Perpetual Peace). A parallel thought came up in relation to Del Noce's "today it is no longer possible" - many were shocked by the Ukraine war because they actually believed that today such a thing is no longer possible (in Europe - and of course some believe that Kant's dream came true in Europe with the EU).
I think there's something interesting about the split between Eastern and Western Christianity, which I've only recently undestood. Holland didn't cover this in his book, which only focused on the West. You (and he) are right that Western Christianity is revolutionary in some ways, especially after the Reformation (but not only then.) This is sort of Illich's point, I think: the attempt to 'immanentise the eschaton.' In the east, however, the faith developed differently, much more focused on the transcendent than the immanent, and so did not act 'in the world' to kick off revolutions in politics or culture. The revolutionary spirit comes from the West. I can't say why.
If Progress wanted peace, then the age of Progress - c1800 to 2000 - would have been a peaceful one. As Del Noce himself points out, it was in fact an age of catastrophic mass violence driven by ideologies which sought to create perfection on Earth. People were shocked by the Ukraine war but did not seem to be equally shocked by the West's wars on Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya, or the ongoing proxy wars fought by the US all over the world, or the ongoing war on nature which Progress fights daily in order to supply some of us with its tainted goods. We see what we are told to see, or what we choose to, now as ever.
One interesting about the East that for almost 1400 years now (give or take a few years and different areas) the heartland of Eastern Christian experience has been occupied by a hostile religion and culture. Constantinople has been occupied for 550 years now. Russia was occupied for several hundred years. The Orthodox experience has been different in that it has often been a minority religion or the religion of the non ruling class. In the West it was the religion of the Ruling class and then later the expanding powers. I wonder if this has something to do with this. I will have to think more on it.
This is a really key point. The same was true in Greece, which was under Ottoman occupation for centuries, and Russia under the Soviets, who killed tens of thousands of Christians and attempted to destroy the entire Church. The Orthodox Church is the only church that has been persecuted in this way systematically, and also never ran crusades or imperial missions as the Western churches did. I think it is crucial to this distinction.
Yes the East knows how to suffer where in the West we have only known "progress and victory" for the last several hundred years. Now of course parts of the West have been occupied but they were on the peripheries such as Spain and Portugal and Hungary. The core has maintained its independence and dominance
The Russian Orthodox Church has been joined to the hip of the Putin regime increasingly during the 21st century: Moscow Patriarch Kirill is an ex-KGB member, as are others who fill high positions in the ROC. The state and the Church seem to be equal partners in the application of the 'Russian World' (Russkiy Mir) strategy, which Putin has directly applied to Ukraine to justify an aggressive revanchism.
Related to the 'Russian World' are Moscow as the 'Third Rome' and the and the even more expansionist 'Eurasian' strategy, which aspires to a Russian empire from "Dublin to Vladivostok"; this last is perhaps most succinctly summarized in these words of Nicolai Patrushev, Chairman of Russia's Security Council: "Who controls eastern Europe, rules the Heartland. Who controls the Heartland, he commands the ‘World Island'. Who rules the ‘World Island,’ he rules the world.”
We in the US, as well as our allies abroad, have rightly criticized, and continue to criticize, US involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. As it should be. My concern is that we are so accustomed to doing so that our first response to the war in Ukraine is, "But the US... ", including an added 'certain sympathy' for Putin: some reading, however, in the now dominant far right ideologies in and around the Kremlin will reveal much deeper roots to the invasion of Ukraine than 'NATO encroachment', and also much greater ambitions. Any of these key phrases I have mentioned above will bring up abundant further research.
This Russian 'traditionalism' (which it is anything but) serves, as Charles Upton has pointed out (Dugin against Dugin: A Traditionalist Critique of the Fourth Political Theory) as a 'right wing' counterpart to the 'end goal' of the 'left' (as the postmodern West), i.e. the destruction of the human form as Imago Dei on the plane of history -or pure chaos. The far right side of things works not on the horizontal plane but the on the vertical plane of hierarchy, but of a false, inverted hierarchy, in which the state/earthly ruler assume the role and authority of God (the state as Absolute). Upton likens these forces to the battle of Gog and Magog, in which both sides work to 'immanentize the eschaton'. He also issues an accompanying warning (in 2018) to the effect that: "Putin's Russia, however, cannot really function as the 'Third Rome' in any integral way. Adn i fth eRussian state elects to move -possiblty wit the help of Aleksandr Dugin -in teh direction fo becoming a renewd 'Holy Empire' .... then teh warning of Rene Guenon shall immediately apply", that warning in reference to "the idea of an organization that would be like the counterpart, but at the same time also the counterfeit, of a tradtional conception such as that of 'Holy Empire', and some such organization must become ... in the language of the Hindu traition, an inverted Chakravarti; universal king." And we can quote Dugin here as saying: "The end of the world will come, but not by itself.... The meaning of Russia is that through the Russian people will be realized the last thought of God, the thought of the end of the world." (in 'Political Theology: Aleksandr Dugin and the Fourth Political Theory", by Moseby, John C, 34-35
Indeed, the only place to be in these times is, the only place we can be, as Paul has rightly reminded us at the 'center of all things', in the full realization of the human being.
I had not intended to write such a long post. In the process I omitted the reference to Guenon: the quote is from his prophetic, Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times", while the whole quote is from Dugin against Dugin, p 16
Fascinating stuff. I've been reading a bit about this myself. You're right that the Russian state has 'appropriated' the leadership (if not the laity) of the church in recent years. I was watching this film recently which put it into historical context.
I don't think we in the West understand Russia (I don't) but my experience with people from eastern Europe has shown me that this part of the world is immensely complex and doesn't fit into our schemata. Putin and Kirill seem to be attempting to restore Russia as a great power and restore its dignity after its collapse, and the West's pillaging of its resources. And yes, the 'Third Rome' prediction, which is centuries old I believe, is definitely an influence, especially on the likes of Dugin. One reason for wanting Ukraine is that it was the birthplace of Orthodoxy in Russia. So there is a lot in the mix. I have a sense that both Russia and the Western powers see Ukraine as an existential battle.
Thank you for your reply -and for your consistently fine essays on important topics. I will watch the film you sent me the link to (but later :) I think you are correct in that we do not understand Russia in the West, and in that I include myself. I have done quite a bit of reading since the war began, as in Putin's address to the nation on 2/22 or 2/24 I thought I heard the voice of Aleksandr Dugin more than once, who I was only vaguely aware of. So I began some research and reading, discovering along the way the various ideologies and ideologues that are influencing Russian media, opinion, and eve the security council and Kremlin. Dugin is only one among many, but his philosophy/theology/geopolitics is perhaps the most often heard: he has been called 'Putin's brain'. So while I hardly can call myself 'knowledgable', I have learned enough to hold a very different view of Russia than I previously had. De Noce might have been right to see an effective resistance to the decay of liberalism as coming in the future from Russian, but in the last 15 years or so Russian politics has become increasingly infected with imperialist, ultranationalist -even fascist -ideology, to the point where where it seems to be now dominant. I am going to include a few links below to some short videos. Much can be found besides this in the way of articles and papers (see the Academia website) on these topics, including the Russian World, the Izborsky Club, and neo-Eurasia.
I shall sign off before I get going any longer! Thank you again for your insights into our times at the deeper, and most fundamental, levels. The first link is a longer video (about 1 hr)
I believe that Dostoevsky is key here. There is great truth in his critique of Western liberalism, which can be appropriated without necessarily falling into his error of Russo-centrism. What Dostoevsky implies is that the fundamental idea of liberalism -- freedom -- is indeed good, perhaps "the" good, but that outside of Christ this freedom inevitably becomes corrupt and as a result, tyrannical. Del Noce opines that in the West a similar conclusion was arrived at by Rosmini, whom I have yet to read.
Eastern Christianity also developed in close proximity to where the Dharma was taught, lived, and flourished. Heck, it even appropriated the Buddha and his story, changed his name, and made him a saint.
Jack often posts concepts (and links) from Eastern Christianity, and when I look into them, I see how close they are to Buddhist concepts/approaches. I have never had this experience with the concepts of Western Christianity, which always seem to be more influenced by Greek thought.
Whatever one thinks of Alan Watts (and I know in your case, Paul, that's not very much) he does in this lecture illuminate two very different ways of thinking of Christ, one common and one effectively obfuscated by the Church. Those ways are, first, as a singular, extraordinary being/event, or second, as a mystic showing the way for any willing to follow.
If in fact this second, mystic Jesus, is the correct understanding of the "Good News", your conversion experience was perhaps not a call from Christ, but rather a Christ-like or Christ-experience:
"The revolutionary spirit comes from the West. I can't say why."
The West prioritizes desires and their fulfillment. Whoever has most toys wins. There is nothing in the West comparable to the Dharmic notion of unattachment. The West is all about attachment to self, the self's desires, and the tumult/revolution that results from trying to fulfill them.
Also, the West developed the notion of the "tragic," which never developed in the East (see Yuk Hui on this):
According to Hui, the Western culture/ideology is based on the concept of tragic discontinuity--Oedipus and the rest of humanity struggle against fate--existing in a perpetual state of revolution of one sort or another. In the East, while there is opposition, continuity and harmony are emphasized--there is not the struggle to break free, but the effort to harmonize and become one with.
I highly recommend Hui's "Art and Cosmotechnics”--beautifully written and brilliant.
Yes, but why is 'the West' - this small part of the Europe - the place where this tendency developed so powerfully? It's a question that fascinates me. Possibly you're right that attachment is the key. Eastern Christianity does focus on askesis and 'death to the world' in a way that the Western traditions don't - though even here there is a long Christian tradition of monasticism and sacrifice. It remains a mystery to me.
I have previously mentioned Fr. John Strickland's series Paradise and Utopia: the Rise and Fall of What the West Once Was. It is written for broader audience (i.e., not academic), and traces this exact theme. The last volume of the series, probably due out later this year, is about our own times, "The Age of Nihilism". The whole series is worth a look.
It seems to me that at some point Western Christianity moved away from askesis and towards something more legalistic. When and where that occurred I don't know -- it seems likely that it happened at different times in different places. But one thing that seems pretty certain is that the Reformation and Counter-Reformation gave the marginalization of asceticism in the West a sizable push.
Along those lines I'd highly recommend Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation, which lays out in great detail how some major traits of modernity are traceable as unintended effects of certain key Reformation ideas, while in no sense downplaying the problems in the Catholic Church of the time that prompted the reformers.
I think that what lies at the root of this Western "problem" is a deep-seated difference between Eastern and Western Christianity's respective understandings of the nature of human freedom. Dostoevsky was certainly onto this, but I've yet to come across anything that examines the issue in a systematic way.
Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation is outstanding… let me also push an essay recently recommended by Patrick Deneen that gives a very different reading on the Reformation:
Cavanaugh argues that what we call “The Wars of Religion” were primarily political wars conducted by elites looking to expand their power and not actually wars fought over conflicting Christian beliefs.,
I have long thought that it is the latent Roman Imperial spirit, coupled with the discovery of Aristotle. Hans Boersma, an evangelical protestant, but an unusual one wrote of these philosophical shifts in his book on what I would call 'the unmaking of Creation' (Also to echo Iain McGilchrist). Boersma - who is interested in the work of the ressourcement Catholoic theologians, who renewed Catholic interest in the patristics - listed the rise of nominalism, voluntarism and univocity. The thing that hit me from his account was how the key events - eg the rise of the doctrine of transubstantiation - occurred in the immediate aftermath of The Great Schism, an event he doesn't reference . . . It is as if 'the head' disconnected from 'the heart', or the wider body. In McGilchrist's terms the disconnection between the left and right hemisphere of the brain which led us to Descartes and The Modern World. Or to use a Thomist account, once you believe their is such a thing as 'natura pura', all bets are off and Nietzche is our destination. Apologies as this is incredibly rambling and disconnected, but as an inheritor and indeed a member of the Western Ecclesial Heirarchy, I think I'm qualified to criticise the Western Church :-)
Thanks for this Eric. The more I read, think and experience the more I understand that the Schism - an event I barely even knew about a few years back - was a massive break in our history, and a big reason for our unique course. There is much to ponder on that.
I have a friend a retired bishop. He once wrote a blog post on ‘all the church things that people blame the current state of the world on’. When I told him that he’d missed out my favourite/ The Great Schism - he replied‘What’s that?’ So you’re not in bad company
I’ve been a Christian from birth but only 20 years ago began to wake up to Orthodoxy.
BTW Paul - in answer to your question 'What does Progress want?', I suggest a very simple answer - 'More'. It is indeed the insatiable Spirit of Moloch. As a priest I hear everywhere the unspoken question, 'why is it never enough?'. Two further references and then I'll return to my contemplation :-) First have you come across Scott Alexander's extended 'Meditation on Moloch'? Worth a look in this regard. Second - Progress - The Timbered Choir by Wendell Berry . . . The pursuit of 'The objective' is a journey form nowhere to nowhere. There are no reference points - every love unloved etc. Blessings on your day!
This is all very cerebral analysis. Simplifying the various strains of emphasis: philosophy, technology, art, harmony vs power/discontinuity, organic relationship-- can we include the commons and community into right relationship and organic techniques such as permaculture and biomimicry to reunite humanity to its place in snd of nature. This is true art in living, orientation to the ground of being and it’s highest expression on earth. As we continue to destroy the nature of things we get further and further from the unitive and cooperative ways that is creation. There are ways to offer and express these principles that number to infinity and keep our humanity intact
From a Buddhist standpoint, humanity is already united with its place in nature. The problem is that people forget this fact, and then undertake efforts at reunification, which fail since you can sew back on a finger that has not been severed. The first step of the Noble Eightfold Path is Right View, and all that is needed is a grounding in it and the subsequent path, and the unity that already exists will become apparent.
"As we continue to destroy the nature of things we get further and further from the unitive and cooperative ways that is creation."
Because people valorize self and desire fulfillment.
Yes indeed, a dangerous turn away from cooperation with our world and its abundance, a part of the whole or holy, as opposed to apart from the whole, alienated, frantic, and competitive
I agree. The birth of christianity was a revolution and that revolutionary zeal to spread the word created endless stream of standard bearers for change from the crusaders and Protestants to modern day islamists and I suppose environmentalists and technologists. Everyone needs a cause to rally round and it all started with Christianity and the requirement to go out and bear witness. It’s a namshub
Yesterday, I was thinking about a curious trend in higher education. I'm a college instructor, but I also help chair our school's assessment committee, so I had to attend an assessment conference this past fall. I only had time for 5 or so sessions, but in at least 3 of them (maybe it was even 4!) the idea of either "assessing spiritual wellness" or "promoting loving action" to our students came up, sometimes just as an off-hand comment, sometimes as a more developed theme. This seemed absolutely bizarre to me and I couldn't make sense of it.
Since then, I've seen this idea of "love" in higher ed come up a few times. A couple weeks ago, I was in a meeting and a participant mentioned the idea of "loving students across the finish line" (in a conversation about student success and graduation rates). Just yesterday I was watching a Youtube conversation with two major figures in my field talking about the idea of "love as praxis" in course design. The concept of "love" is becoming the trendy new higher ed thing, and it's weird! And it jives pretty well with what you're discussing here--the transcendent being co-opted by the worldly institutions. College as the new church, where you don't just learn an academic discipline but also learn to "love" (and are maybe even asked to self-assess spiritual wellness???) Perhaps the culture of higher ed wants to replace religion with itself. I don't want to jump to conclusions, and I imagine the intentions of the people espousing this are good (i.e. they want the best for students), but...there is something sinister behind it, it seems to me.
This hits home for me because I also work in education and am trying to discover ways to bring more story, poetry, and imagination into schools. The problem with this, is that most schools—being essentially products of this 'machine-minded' phenomenon that Paul has been outlining so carefully over the past few years—is that the school, or institution, tends to either absorb and trivialize attempts to incorporate into it anything resembling a grass-roots community based culture of care, or is actively hostile toward such methods. I've had conversations with friends, sharing accounts that were similar from other contexts, i.e. everywhere from corporations to national healthcare workers, all of whom seemed equally exhausted by the prospect of reform. I agree with Paul that the answer to the machine is essentially one rooted in the transcendent. However, I've begun to grow more and more skeptical of my own inclination to try and bring something of that experience back into institutions that are clearly eating their own tails and getting into all sorts of strange contortions like the ones you've described above and which I've also witnessed. My sense is that the truly resilient communities of the coming years, acting as forces of gentle resistance to this corrosive trend.. will by necessity be grounded in the tried and true; the pathways to the divine that are well walked and well marked. Vague pronouncements of 'love' and 'growth mindset', etc.. work in the corporate sphere precisely because they are so vague, not rooted in a real tradition and strike me as yet more examples of shapeshifting 'liquid' modernity. Isn't it ironic that the origin of the University system was originally grounded in the Church—Universities adorned with Latin mottos and maxims, few today can even read? It's no wonder that University campuses are ground-zero today for the push and pull of the so-called culture war. It brings me back to the old question of whether or not to work for reform within the system, or start over once again small and humble beyond the pale.
Really insightful comment, thank you! Your observation about the origin of universities coming "full circle" to some extent is so interesting. It seems there are new school systems in development that are trying to "start over once again," and those would be the sort of "classical academy" model that I see popping up everywhere. I understand the impulse, but I'm skeptical of these, too, as they often seem to be run by/promote a sort of reactionary "cultural warrior" ethos which is also a significant problem, IMO. But it's no accident that they are teaching their students Latin, Greek, logic, rhetoric, etc, because those formed the foundations of western education, as you indicate above. And I guess I don't necessarily have a problem with teaching those things in that manner--but I wonder to what extent the appeal to this education system is "my kid is so smart and exclusive--he knows LATIN!"
"Love" is to modern academia what water is to bottled water--a free-flowing gift to all of us that existed for eternity without any need for a sales pitch turned into a packaged product that quickly makes its user forget all about the real thing.
Really interesting. I wonder also if the claim of “loving” students acts as cover for standards to be lowered: if you (are pretending to) “love” your students, it’s hard to fail them - especially if the “love” is in fact mere sentimentality, which it is. Real love will raise standards and encourage students to stretch themselves. After all, how much interest do these teachers show in the kids once they leave?
Precisely. Learning Latin is great! But without humility, prayer, ascetic practice.. it becomes as you suggest, swallowed by the market of personal “fulfillment”. I mean even in Plato’s day, they were constantly arguing if you could actually instruct someone to “be a good person”. Socrate’s main critique was that you couldn’t trust people (Sophists) who accepted payment, claiming to churn out model statesmen...
Paul - have you read Iain McGilchrist or encountered his ideas around our divided brain, and the subordination of parts of our cognition (contextual, intuitive) by other parts (rational, instrumental) and how this might tie into your ideas around the Machine?
I am early in my exploration of both his ideas and yours, but I would love to see you two in conversation.
That's right - I have a dream of taking a vacation and curling up next to a fireplace while reading a nice hardcover of his newer series, The Matter With Things! On my ever expanding reading list...
People always ask me this! Yes, I think he's a very important voice on these issues. I think the Machine is very much a product of the Emissary's rebellion. Perhaps the Machine is the Emissary himself, made manifest.
May 25, 2022·edited May 25, 2022Liked by Paul Kingsnorth
The postmodern emphasis on narrative can sometimes be overdone. Yet it usually is the best story that wins. Not always the deepest story, but the one told in the most compelling way. An often fine distinction, I admit. This is why I am often down on the para-scholarly mode ("left brain" narrative) I habitually fall into. It is far more conducive to the glazing of eyes than changing of hearts.
The Master and His Emissary tells us why that is--and now The Matter with Things. The question I have is about my own capacity to absorb it all and not reduce it down to the para-scholarly or the merely ideological. We are asking a lot of ourselves here.
This is a massive undertaking, and it isn't a reach to say we all feel the pressure of time...because something is closing in. Something palpable, ominous but all too slippery to pin down. If I fall into machine modes to oppose the machine the monster only grows. It is daunting, sometimes terrifying, but also exciting and potentially joyful.
The Abbey is a strange attractor in the these chaotic times for those drawn, realistically or not, to this massive project, or certainly one such. A project that isn't only intellectual, or even mostly so, but a radical transformation of our hearts. This is what gives me hope.
Personally I have started to try to focus on the beam in my own eye, as Jesus said, and show the truth to others via my actions. But it doesn't feel like it's enough.
The point is that Isaiah himself lived through a very similar time to the one described here. He struggles to plot a way through over some 40 years, trying to find a way to allevate or delay the coming disaster. This is the closest section to the analysis we've been reading for the last year. It ends with the final disaster looming.
From about the two-thirds point of the book, the focus changes, and the writing is some 100-150 years later, from the community of First Isaiah's followers. The questions now are, for sixteen chapters, when there's an opportunity to start again, how do recognise it and how to we take it? And then, a few years after that, it becomes, how do we avoid making the same mistakes again?
People may recall that my purpose in being here is to help answer the question, "How can I live well and tell good news stories in post-industrial West Yorkshire?" My thought is that some of the stories from the (generally unsuccessful) attempts to build a renewed society after the Exile in Babylon had ended might throw light on what to try and what to avoid now: offer something positive as well as negative in the criticism of Kelly, Zuckerberg et al.
This is exactly why I pay for a subscription, this was perhaps one of your best pieces of writing Paul, and laid out a lot of the problems facing modern society in a general abstract way. It reminded me a lot of Scott Alexander's essay on Moloch, which also turned me onto his substack as well.
Transcendence is, of course, the problem and that we now are told from a very early age that transcendence is stupid and it cannot occur. Either by our parents, by our teachers, or what I see most of all, by our friends. The problem that faces us and that both Moloch and the Anti-Christ represent is the issue of unabashed materialism. A few months ago, I was sitting in church and the Gospel reading was from Mark, Jesus and the Rich Young Man. That reading resonated with me a great deal that day, because it gets to the very core of what is wrong with our society, both back in the ancient world and especially now. We have to give up our possessions, but we have built a society around acquiring 'thing' after 'thing.' David Bentley Hart argued that this is what made Christ so radical, because when he says to give up your possessions and follow, He means it. He doesn't mean, give up some of your possessions, or give up a few things and volunteer more, all those things are good, but it truly means to give up your life and follow.
I think this is why so many people despise monks. We either exoticize them in the Buddhist tradition, or laugh at them in the Christian tradition, because we could never even dream of doing what they have done. Dedicate their life to poverty.
There have been, of course, other paths throughout time. I think about Punk Rock in the 70s and 80s, that had band members eating out of garbage cans, and truly throwing away the materialist side of society. But today, much like Guy Debord would write in his work on the Society of Spectacle, this is just a shadow image now. A symbol without meaning. Of people going to concerts to get their badges and showing off their credentials instead of living a distinct lifestyle. Monks, you could say, have not abandoned that tradition.
It is a slow process for me and every day I struggle greatly with faith. Trying to find more strength in the church, and to give more back to my community, with the hope that one day, that similar to Galahad or Percival, that I will tread on a path that leads to greater understanding, transcendence, and love. But materialism, I fully believe, is the greatest road block to that path.
Something further is that we need to rediscover how to die. So much of materialism and then transhumanism postulates this silly idea that we will live forever, that we will enjoy the fruits of our vast wealth forever, but we won't. We no longer die in the home, instead perishing hooked up to massive machinery, trying to squeeze more rotten life out of us. Learning how to die nobly again I think would be a big step in the confrontation with Moloch.
I agree about dying. Without transcendence death is abhorrent... so they long for this silly story about living forever, but for people of faith it should be different.
I would like to think that what you're feeling is the beginning of the end of the profoundly anti-human theo-technology of "americanization."Some of its more devoted apostles (eg, Walter Russell Mead) do demand (and in these exact words) a permanent revolution. Nevertheless, "it is history that teaches us to hope," as Genl Robert E Lee said. And I personally am profoundly hopeful. It's analogous, perhaps, to the end of the Soviet regime in Russia, when people simply stopped believing the lies. I do not think they are as powerful as they think they are, either.
This essay seems to me like a condensed and updated version of the book 'Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age' by Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose. The book is one chapter of what was intended to be a monumental book titled 'The Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Man'. Rose (who earlier in his life had known and followed Alan Ginsberg and the other Beat poets) began writing it in 1962 but afterwards gave up the project eventually becoming an Orthodox monk in the hills of northern California. This book really blew my mind with its perceptiveness when I first read it - highly recommended.
I'm actually planning to write about Fr Seraphim later in the series, and especially his ideas about what 'the religion of the future' will look like. He's a deeply important figure for modern people I think, and will become more so as the Machine advances.
Where you see the fearsome approach of the machine, I see a machine in decline. Its story is less energetic every year. More and more people escape its narrative. Shelves are empty, communication networks degrade, more police is hired to delay the inevitable.
I'm not sure they necessary conflict. I wrote before (somewhere here) about the future being a likely combination of breakdown and clampdown. I think the Machine is hitting limits everywhere, and we can see it more clearly each day. But I see it tightening its grip in response.
The east? As in China? China will collapse sooner than the West. Modern Chinese political life is merely the excrescence of European materialist theories combined with Confucian authoritarianism and mindless nationalism. A horrible brew which deserves to fall, the sooner the better.
I agree with your writing and outlook. It really hits home and puts to words a lot of what I feel. But what to do? How to resist? The only way I have found sanity and a modicum of understanding it to getting back to the patterns of nature. Eating seasonally and suffering through the boom years and celebrating on the years of a big harvest. This year is a bust year for my blueberries. Of course I am not off the grid but I am a bit removed from total dependence. I am unplugged in a lot of ways. I don't have a smart phone so when I am somewhere I am just there. The call of the screen is not always pulling me away from the real world. The most important thing is that I am a Orthodox Traditionalist Anglican. Daily I try to follow our lectionary and pray at least one of the daily offices. There is nothing better and it keeps us on the real and focused on things past the immediate.
These are the big questions. Sounds like we ahve similar situations. I will be dedicating the third part of my series here to thinking about them, so it won't all be just staring into the abyss. I'm looking forward to it myself.
Even now I don't think I am resisting but I am only treading water. I am always trying to find ways to protect my children from this false life they are offered. Most people I see, even the successful ones, appear to have what I call the scream about them. The scream is your mind and body being sucked into the modern world and it is trapped. Even when appearing happy they have a glitch in them. Their inner self or soul is screaming to resist but they can't. Instead they give into the latest health fad, work out fad, trying to stay ever young, the next big vacation and seeing the world, or a get away to nature with the obligatory deep thinking pic.
Someone said to me recently that things like praying the daily offices can be seen as part of "stacking" your life. I like that imagery a lot, stacking the daily routine with practices that turn us towards God, making ever less and less room for the things that turn us away from him.
“Hast thou considered one who takes his caprice as his god, God having led him astray knowingly, and sealed his hearing and his heart and placed a cover upon his sight? Who, then, will guide him after God? Will you not, then, remember?” (45:23)
The above verse, from the Quran, describes liberalism quite presciently, as the worldview that results from our choice to forget God, a feat that Satan had promised to accomplish (12:42). In response, God decreed that we will be forgotten: “And be not like those who forget God, such that He makes them forget their souls. It is they who are the iniquitous.” (59:19).
We are lost souls, lonely souls, and you Paul, God bless you, can see the light. Thank you for your thoughts and words.
Start liking it. As the middle class in the West is picked clean and tossed away, Moloch will need something else to eat.
If Marx teaches us nothing else, he teaches us that everything id downstream of technology and economics. The state of technology determines what choices are possible; economics determines what choices are feasible. If technology makes a restaurant possible, a rich man can have anything on the menu. A poor man must budget. A housecat can plump out on "Tender Vittles". A feral cat must hunt or find a trash can.
Taken to its logical conclusion, this instrumentalist worldview is sociopathic. Thing is, Marx is wrong about a lot of things, but this time he is right, and on a larger scale even than Machiavelli. What both had in common is that sought to describe accurately *how* *the* *real* *world* *actually* *works*, how the princes really act, regardless of their fine-sounding justifications and the glib propaganda produced by their smirking courtiers.
This is the real reason that Marx, or at least his worldview, is opposed to the worldview of Christ. Not because the Frankfurt School tried to offer cultural (as opposed to economic) explanations as to why The Revolution hadn't happened yet, but because Christ saw people as something other than instrumental, as tools to be judged by their usefulness, as props in a play or greyhounds to be killed if they can't make the cut.
You get no earthly rewards for treating humans and cats as you would wish to be treated. Quite the contrary. In fact, the people of wealth, power and influence are but glorified sociopaths and behave accordingly (or they would soon lose their high places), but even so, many will die peacefully in their beds, loved and celebrated by many. They got their rewards. They got The Goodies up front.
Rathe, Christ teaches us to follow Him, even though our earthly goals are furthered by treating others as means for us to achieve our ends, even though the earthly consequences of following Christ (whether you use that specific term or not) are temptation, mockery and suffering.
If you think about it, if the Real World really is all there is, to follow Christ is insane. No wonder The Way is narrow, that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.....
I see no reason to believe that you get no earthly rewards for treating human beings or cats as you would wish to be treated. I think you do. But it depends on what kind of rewards you are looking for. For many years, I have gotten many earthly "rewards" for treating others the way I would like to be treated, even saying "thank you" to my three year olds when they did something for me, for example. Why not ?
I don't know what "the real world" is. Not knowing what the "real world" is has tremendous advantages : it gives YOU a tremendous amount of liberty in your daily actions, and it gives the people you enter into contact with the possibility of... doing what they like, assuming THEIR FREEDOM (which is the freedom that Christ was talking about...) in person to person contacts (not official, institutional ones...).
One thing that I have found over all these years is that my attitude makes many people respect and/or fear me. This has its advantages AND.. its disadvantages.
But since Jesus's ministry was so centered around freedom, it is important to remember that all freedom comes with a price, and with the ultimate question : are you willing to pay the price for that freedom ?
Have you looked at the rich, the successful, the powerful, the influential?
The Iron Law of Oligarchy is most instructive here.
I don't look at them very much. The price they pay for their riches, their success, their power and their influence is high indeed...
That is sort of my point.
I'm sorry for reading you wrong then. It's so easy on the Machine, right ?
No worries.
I get what you are saying, but they, "the people of wealth, power and influence" are not loved and they don't all die in their beds (see Epstein, though I suppose he was, in their world, nothing more than a pool boy). It seems, from our vantage point, that they are living well, but my guess is they are, for the most part, miserable - comfortable, yes, rich, yes, but ultimately miserable.
And, the real world is the world of Christ. Just because so many people miss that fact doesn't mean it isn't true.
Feral cat no more that was profound.
Thank you for the kind words but I still live by my wits.
Feral, say no more
Interesting essay, as always.
One phrase comes to my mind as the most pertinent one about sacrifice ; it comes from Allegri's "Miserere" which I listen to often. The text must be very old, and I don't know who is speaking, but it is not essential. The speaker says at one point that the sacrifice that (the Christian) God wants is a repentant heart. That speaks to me radically. The repentant heart was meant to blot out a great deal of those smoking, bloody animal sacrifices in various temples all over the world, including in the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. The sacrifice of a repentant heart, coupled with Jesus's sacrifice in his bloody physical death by crucifixion, and Mary's trial at seeing her child suffer and die before her are the sacrifices that the Christian world offers in replacement of the old ways. The institution of the Catholic Church constantly reactualized Christ's sacrifice in the ceremony of the Mass. Very important.
That said... it seems to me that we are witnessing the birth of a new religion that is emerging from scientific scepticism. This has been coalescing maybe since the 19th century, the century that gave us the word "ecology", a modern construction from Greek etymons/roots. I don't like this religion at all, but what is emerging seems religious to me in its goals, and in its attempt at universal ? colonisation. Will it constitute... a transcendance ? Is it already attempting to constitute a transcendance ? It's funny how fast ideas can flip-flop in the Internet age.
Colonisation goes way back. The ancient Greeks were colonising, and the spread of their culture, their language is deeply responsible for where we are right now.
Speaking of the Greeks, and the Athenians... maybe some people here know that the cynicism, the hopelessness about corruption in democracy can be seen in Aristophanes, so there is nothing new about it, even if we would like to think that technology is radically changing us.
And on democracy : years ago, Konrad Lorenz wrote a book called the ten ? capital sins of capitalism, and he speculated briefly about democracy, comparing it to the phenomenon of schools of fish where identical individuals were grouped together in masses/schools, and maintained an identical distance between each other. In the school of fish there are no couples, no sexual reproduction between two partners, and no "child rearing" because there is no.. individual identity among the.. individuals.
Is the god who is tormenting us Moloch or... Dionysos ?
Probably Moloch is more straightforward than Dionysos. Dionysos is the god of the theatre, of wine... spirits, we could say. When he gets hold of people, they go berserk.
"All the world's a stage"... that is Dionysos' world. God help us when the theatre is everywhere BUT on the stage.
...
For sure, the slavery issue is sending us berserk right now. Trying to figure out who is a slave and who isn't, and hoping that WE aren't secretly slaves...
I am watching my kids raising their little ones, and it is hard sometimes. I have tried telling them that there is a world between saying "thank you" to a child who does something that you have asked him to do, or something that pleases you, and saying "bravo". There is a world of difference between the two responses, and the slavery issue is a big part of it, in ways that we have a hard time seeing.
I like the idea of Dionysos being one of our modern gods. That makes sense too.
If any of the Greek gods have power over us now, it would be Apollo, and Hephaestus,... and Athena. Dionysus is less the god of wine that the god of fecundity, resurrection, and renewal. Like Osiris, Dionysus was rent asunder, but he was *born again*. Dionysus is the god of frenzy, intuition, emotion, and visceral feeling, NOT of mind. We are so cerebral today: we are such egotists, that we are practically robots. Dionysus is the antidote to this, as are the saints of crazy wisdom, and holy fools. I can imagine Dionysus and Christ sitting down together and agreeing on most things. Christianity today is very little Christian. As David Bentley Hart stated in one of his articles, Christianity was never the religion of America, America was always the religion of America. Just look to American Catholicism, particularly as represented by groups such as Word on Fire, which put out repugnant videos on "God and gaming," and wholeheartedly adopt the consumeristic mentality. The Christ that many Christians worship today may very well be not Christ, but the anti-Christ. Chesterton hinted at this in some of his essays. Vladimir Solovyov and Philip Sherrard were more explicit; and Georges Bernanos, the great Catholic writer, came right out and said what needed to be said, namely that we are now idol worshipers in the grossest possible manner, with money and the Machine as our idols. In my recent (as yet unpublished) work on the Machine, and anti-Machine theology, I have been asked numerous times "does the Machine have agency?" to which I would respond yes, the Machine is one particular manifestation of the anti-Christ. Satan can be loved; Satan has a divine purpose; Satan, according to much mystical theology was a great lover of God and the greatest of monotheists, ... but the anti-Christ is an aberration, it is abnormal, a cancer upon the world, and the form it takes is the Machine. The antidote to the Machine is true religion, because true religion must always be anti-Machine. As Lawrence wrote "Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or much dry bread with Jesus, but don’t sit down without one of the gods." This is the hardest thing of all, since it puts one at odds not only with the secular materialist atheists, but also with the lower-case "o" orthodox religious of all faiths who nominally practice, but in reality have hearts filled with hubris, self-love, and an addiction to technology. We need to move away from progress, not automatically, not mechanically, but creatively, and in tune with the wisdom gleaned from trees, fairies, all the great Gods, and the primordial Fire that is beyond being.
The idea of worshipping idols is one that stems from pagan rituals of parading "GRAVEN IMAGES", statues that could be seen, through the streets in processions, for example. There is a link in most people's minds between the act of seeing, and images, graven images. (Writing is a graven image, by the way...)
The Jewish God is particular to the extent that He manifests himself as a voice, not as an image to be SEEN. Perhaps some people could be tempted to think that anything that doesn't take the form of an image to be seen could escape from the idolatry problem. What IS the idolatry problem, by the way ? I don't think it can be reduced to the devil, money and the Machine. I speculate that the idolatry problem arises from the temptation to circumcise, to encase the divine as movement into a static form, whatever that form may take. Life as dynamic, movement, becoming, refuses to be limited to a form that englobes it, and makes it static. I believe that the Jewish God, as he is "evoked" in His name in the Tetragram is life itself as dynamic, and unpredictable movement.
Maybe what the Jews did NOT foresee ? was that they could not escape this temptation by blotting out the WRITTEN (image...) name of God in their writing, and refusing to pronounce the Tetragram in speech. Even when Man finds crafty solutions to wiggle out of his temptations... the corruption of the best engenders the worst.
I find it capital that we reason with so many oppositions : can we do otherwise, but opposing Christ/Anti-Christ, heart/mind, intelligence/emotion, inner/outer, mechanical/creative, I want to question these oppositions, and why we want to oppose.
What is wrong with an intelligent heart ?
>As Lawrence wrote "Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or much dry bread with Jesus, but don’t sit down without one of the gods." This is the hardest thing of all, since it puts one at odds not only with the secular materialist atheists, but also with the lower-case "o" orthodox religious of all faiths who nominally practice, but in reality have hearts filled with hubris, self-love, and an addiction to technology.
Thank you so much for writing this part. I've recently moved to converting to Orthodoxy having never learned much about Christianity, and the nominal practitioners are the hardest thing to overcome as someone who still has doubt in their heart.
May your creativity and divine love continue to burn within you.
and Nietzsche was his apostle
Have you read "The Immortality Key" by the Jesuit lawyer Brian Muraresku? He has some fascinating arguments around the influence of Dionysian mythologies on Christianity. Drugs too. Loads of drugs.
hey thanks for the Allegri recommendation...i just listened and is beautiful (almost as good as Pergolesi's Stabat Mater)...cheers!
I'm glad you liked it. I have it in several versions, but the one that I like the best is the A Sei Voci version where you can hear it first in baroque, with freestyle improvisation in all the voices, and at the end, in the crystallised version that it ended up becoming when Mozart heard it in the Vatican chapel ? and wrote it up to make it... public for posterity.
Meanwhile, Google is claiming a breakthrough with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/13/deepminds-new-ai-can-perform-over-600-tasks-from-playing-games-to-controlling-robots/
It has a name: Gato.
Ginsberg's poem 'Howl' really hit me in the gut when I first read it, back in the early 60s. I've just had my own book about this subject published - it's called 'Village Building at the End of the World', and covers into much the same material as Paul's essay series on 'The Machine' (I hope it's OK to mention it here). I've referred to Rudolf Steiner's work on the old Zoroastrian 'devil', Ahriman, as an embodiment of the 'dark force' that's behind all this - I think it works very well as a symbol for the relentless tenacity with which it is trying to pull us downwards into a kind of zombie state - to replace the Human with the robotic, and turn the human spirit into a nightmarish simulacrum of itself. I agree with Paul that the best way we can meet this threat is to 'turn away from the Machine in our own hearts and minds, one human soul at a time'.
One thought in relation to the business of revolution: as I read Tom Holland's _Dominion_ I was struck by the fact that the Age of Revolutions does NOT begin in the late 18th century, but rather goes back far earlier, and is to be associated with Christianity. My sense is that once Christianity has taken root, then you have a repeated revolutionary impulse, an attempt to realise heaven on earth; the French / Russian / etc. revolutions are simply continuations of the tradition (and revolutions of this kind seem to me conspicuously absent in antiquity).
Also, when I read 'what does Progress want?', I immediately thought 'peace.' I think this answer would be given on a common-sense level by many, and it has roots in the liberal-enlightened tradition (e.g., Kant's Perpetual Peace). A parallel thought came up in relation to Del Noce's "today it is no longer possible" - many were shocked by the Ukraine war because they actually believed that today such a thing is no longer possible (in Europe - and of course some believe that Kant's dream came true in Europe with the EU).
I think there's something interesting about the split between Eastern and Western Christianity, which I've only recently undestood. Holland didn't cover this in his book, which only focused on the West. You (and he) are right that Western Christianity is revolutionary in some ways, especially after the Reformation (but not only then.) This is sort of Illich's point, I think: the attempt to 'immanentise the eschaton.' In the east, however, the faith developed differently, much more focused on the transcendent than the immanent, and so did not act 'in the world' to kick off revolutions in politics or culture. The revolutionary spirit comes from the West. I can't say why.
If Progress wanted peace, then the age of Progress - c1800 to 2000 - would have been a peaceful one. As Del Noce himself points out, it was in fact an age of catastrophic mass violence driven by ideologies which sought to create perfection on Earth. People were shocked by the Ukraine war but did not seem to be equally shocked by the West's wars on Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya, or the ongoing proxy wars fought by the US all over the world, or the ongoing war on nature which Progress fights daily in order to supply some of us with its tainted goods. We see what we are told to see, or what we choose to, now as ever.
One interesting about the East that for almost 1400 years now (give or take a few years and different areas) the heartland of Eastern Christian experience has been occupied by a hostile religion and culture. Constantinople has been occupied for 550 years now. Russia was occupied for several hundred years. The Orthodox experience has been different in that it has often been a minority religion or the religion of the non ruling class. In the West it was the religion of the Ruling class and then later the expanding powers. I wonder if this has something to do with this. I will have to think more on it.
This is a really key point. The same was true in Greece, which was under Ottoman occupation for centuries, and Russia under the Soviets, who killed tens of thousands of Christians and attempted to destroy the entire Church. The Orthodox Church is the only church that has been persecuted in this way systematically, and also never ran crusades or imperial missions as the Western churches did. I think it is crucial to this distinction.
Yes the East knows how to suffer where in the West we have only known "progress and victory" for the last several hundred years. Now of course parts of the West have been occupied but they were on the peripheries such as Spain and Portugal and Hungary. The core has maintained its independence and dominance
So maybe what we are going to be taught now is how to suffer too ...
The Russian Orthodox Church has been joined to the hip of the Putin regime increasingly during the 21st century: Moscow Patriarch Kirill is an ex-KGB member, as are others who fill high positions in the ROC. The state and the Church seem to be equal partners in the application of the 'Russian World' (Russkiy Mir) strategy, which Putin has directly applied to Ukraine to justify an aggressive revanchism.
Related to the 'Russian World' are Moscow as the 'Third Rome' and the and the even more expansionist 'Eurasian' strategy, which aspires to a Russian empire from "Dublin to Vladivostok"; this last is perhaps most succinctly summarized in these words of Nicolai Patrushev, Chairman of Russia's Security Council: "Who controls eastern Europe, rules the Heartland. Who controls the Heartland, he commands the ‘World Island'. Who rules the ‘World Island,’ he rules the world.”
We in the US, as well as our allies abroad, have rightly criticized, and continue to criticize, US involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. As it should be. My concern is that we are so accustomed to doing so that our first response to the war in Ukraine is, "But the US... ", including an added 'certain sympathy' for Putin: some reading, however, in the now dominant far right ideologies in and around the Kremlin will reveal much deeper roots to the invasion of Ukraine than 'NATO encroachment', and also much greater ambitions. Any of these key phrases I have mentioned above will bring up abundant further research.
This Russian 'traditionalism' (which it is anything but) serves, as Charles Upton has pointed out (Dugin against Dugin: A Traditionalist Critique of the Fourth Political Theory) as a 'right wing' counterpart to the 'end goal' of the 'left' (as the postmodern West), i.e. the destruction of the human form as Imago Dei on the plane of history -or pure chaos. The far right side of things works not on the horizontal plane but the on the vertical plane of hierarchy, but of a false, inverted hierarchy, in which the state/earthly ruler assume the role and authority of God (the state as Absolute). Upton likens these forces to the battle of Gog and Magog, in which both sides work to 'immanentize the eschaton'. He also issues an accompanying warning (in 2018) to the effect that: "Putin's Russia, however, cannot really function as the 'Third Rome' in any integral way. Adn i fth eRussian state elects to move -possiblty wit the help of Aleksandr Dugin -in teh direction fo becoming a renewd 'Holy Empire' .... then teh warning of Rene Guenon shall immediately apply", that warning in reference to "the idea of an organization that would be like the counterpart, but at the same time also the counterfeit, of a tradtional conception such as that of 'Holy Empire', and some such organization must become ... in the language of the Hindu traition, an inverted Chakravarti; universal king." And we can quote Dugin here as saying: "The end of the world will come, but not by itself.... The meaning of Russia is that through the Russian people will be realized the last thought of God, the thought of the end of the world." (in 'Political Theology: Aleksandr Dugin and the Fourth Political Theory", by Moseby, John C, 34-35
Indeed, the only place to be in these times is, the only place we can be, as Paul has rightly reminded us at the 'center of all things', in the full realization of the human being.
I had not intended to write such a long post. In the process I omitted the reference to Guenon: the quote is from his prophetic, Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times", while the whole quote is from Dugin against Dugin, p 16
Fascinating stuff. I've been reading a bit about this myself. You're right that the Russian state has 'appropriated' the leadership (if not the laity) of the church in recent years. I was watching this film recently which put it into historical context.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b32qav9QrYU
I don't think we in the West understand Russia (I don't) but my experience with people from eastern Europe has shown me that this part of the world is immensely complex and doesn't fit into our schemata. Putin and Kirill seem to be attempting to restore Russia as a great power and restore its dignity after its collapse, and the West's pillaging of its resources. And yes, the 'Third Rome' prediction, which is centuries old I believe, is definitely an influence, especially on the likes of Dugin. One reason for wanting Ukraine is that it was the birthplace of Orthodoxy in Russia. So there is a lot in the mix. I have a sense that both Russia and the Western powers see Ukraine as an existential battle.
Thank you for your reply -and for your consistently fine essays on important topics. I will watch the film you sent me the link to (but later :) I think you are correct in that we do not understand Russia in the West, and in that I include myself. I have done quite a bit of reading since the war began, as in Putin's address to the nation on 2/22 or 2/24 I thought I heard the voice of Aleksandr Dugin more than once, who I was only vaguely aware of. So I began some research and reading, discovering along the way the various ideologies and ideologues that are influencing Russian media, opinion, and eve the security council and Kremlin. Dugin is only one among many, but his philosophy/theology/geopolitics is perhaps the most often heard: he has been called 'Putin's brain'. So while I hardly can call myself 'knowledgable', I have learned enough to hold a very different view of Russia than I previously had. De Noce might have been right to see an effective resistance to the decay of liberalism as coming in the future from Russian, but in the last 15 years or so Russian politics has become increasingly infected with imperialist, ultranationalist -even fascist -ideology, to the point where where it seems to be now dominant. I am going to include a few links below to some short videos. Much can be found besides this in the way of articles and papers (see the Academia website) on these topics, including the Russian World, the Izborsky Club, and neo-Eurasia.
I shall sign off before I get going any longer! Thank you again for your insights into our times at the deeper, and most fundamental, levels. The first link is a longer video (about 1 hr)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gh09OfNCT5E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cr6oqHPrKo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnGcbxxOMwE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9MSV9Bp35Y
I believe that Dostoevsky is key here. There is great truth in his critique of Western liberalism, which can be appropriated without necessarily falling into his error of Russo-centrism. What Dostoevsky implies is that the fundamental idea of liberalism -- freedom -- is indeed good, perhaps "the" good, but that outside of Christ this freedom inevitably becomes corrupt and as a result, tyrannical. Del Noce opines that in the West a similar conclusion was arrived at by Rosmini, whom I have yet to read.
Eastern Christianity also developed in close proximity to where the Dharma was taught, lived, and flourished. Heck, it even appropriated the Buddha and his story, changed his name, and made him a saint.
Jack often posts concepts (and links) from Eastern Christianity, and when I look into them, I see how close they are to Buddhist concepts/approaches. I have never had this experience with the concepts of Western Christianity, which always seem to be more influenced by Greek thought.
You're going to have to back up that Buddha claim! I want to see this!
David Bentley Hart wrote an article about “Saint Sakyamuni” for First Things a while back:
Saint Sakyamuni
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2009/09/saint-sakyamuni
Thanks for this Jacob. I was unaware of it.
Whatever one thinks of Alan Watts (and I know in your case, Paul, that's not very much) he does in this lecture illuminate two very different ways of thinking of Christ, one common and one effectively obfuscated by the Church. Those ways are, first, as a singular, extraordinary being/event, or second, as a mystic showing the way for any willing to follow.
If in fact this second, mystic Jesus, is the correct understanding of the "Good News", your conversion experience was perhaps not a call from Christ, but rather a Christ-like or Christ-experience:
https://youtu.be/avN_gQ7NC0I
"The revolutionary spirit comes from the West. I can't say why."
The West prioritizes desires and their fulfillment. Whoever has most toys wins. There is nothing in the West comparable to the Dharmic notion of unattachment. The West is all about attachment to self, the self's desires, and the tumult/revolution that results from trying to fulfill them.
Also, the West developed the notion of the "tragic," which never developed in the East (see Yuk Hui on this):
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/technology-after-hegemony-on-yuk-huis-art-and-cosmotechnics/
According to Hui, the Western culture/ideology is based on the concept of tragic discontinuity--Oedipus and the rest of humanity struggle against fate--existing in a perpetual state of revolution of one sort or another. In the East, while there is opposition, continuity and harmony are emphasized--there is not the struggle to break free, but the effort to harmonize and become one with.
I highly recommend Hui's "Art and Cosmotechnics”--beautifully written and brilliant.
Yes, but why is 'the West' - this small part of the Europe - the place where this tendency developed so powerfully? It's a question that fascinates me. Possibly you're right that attachment is the key. Eastern Christianity does focus on askesis and 'death to the world' in a way that the Western traditions don't - though even here there is a long Christian tradition of monasticism and sacrifice. It remains a mystery to me.
I have previously mentioned Fr. John Strickland's series Paradise and Utopia: the Rise and Fall of What the West Once Was. It is written for broader audience (i.e., not academic), and traces this exact theme. The last volume of the series, probably due out later this year, is about our own times, "The Age of Nihilism". The whole series is worth a look.
It seems to me that at some point Western Christianity moved away from askesis and towards something more legalistic. When and where that occurred I don't know -- it seems likely that it happened at different times in different places. But one thing that seems pretty certain is that the Reformation and Counter-Reformation gave the marginalization of asceticism in the West a sizable push.
Along those lines I'd highly recommend Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation, which lays out in great detail how some major traits of modernity are traceable as unintended effects of certain key Reformation ideas, while in no sense downplaying the problems in the Catholic Church of the time that prompted the reformers.
I think that what lies at the root of this Western "problem" is a deep-seated difference between Eastern and Western Christianity's respective understandings of the nature of human freedom. Dostoevsky was certainly onto this, but I've yet to come across anything that examines the issue in a systematic way.
Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation is outstanding… let me also push an essay recently recommended by Patrick Deneen that gives a very different reading on the Reformation:
http://www.jesusradicals.com/uploads/2/6/3/8/26388433/wars-of-religion-and-the-rise-of-the-state.pdf
Cavanaugh argues that what we call “The Wars of Religion” were primarily political wars conducted by elites looking to expand their power and not actually wars fought over conflicting Christian beliefs.,
Yeah, that's a great essay. Cavanaugh later expanded its argument into a book, 'The Myth of Religious Violence.'
Thanks for these. I wrote about Deneen's book, and Gregory's, in some previous essays. I agree that they really fill in some gaps.
I have long thought that it is the latent Roman Imperial spirit, coupled with the discovery of Aristotle. Hans Boersma, an evangelical protestant, but an unusual one wrote of these philosophical shifts in his book on what I would call 'the unmaking of Creation' (Also to echo Iain McGilchrist). Boersma - who is interested in the work of the ressourcement Catholoic theologians, who renewed Catholic interest in the patristics - listed the rise of nominalism, voluntarism and univocity. The thing that hit me from his account was how the key events - eg the rise of the doctrine of transubstantiation - occurred in the immediate aftermath of The Great Schism, an event he doesn't reference . . . It is as if 'the head' disconnected from 'the heart', or the wider body. In McGilchrist's terms the disconnection between the left and right hemisphere of the brain which led us to Descartes and The Modern World. Or to use a Thomist account, once you believe their is such a thing as 'natura pura', all bets are off and Nietzche is our destination. Apologies as this is incredibly rambling and disconnected, but as an inheritor and indeed a member of the Western Ecclesial Heirarchy, I think I'm qualified to criticise the Western Church :-)
Thanks for this Eric. The more I read, think and experience the more I understand that the Schism - an event I barely even knew about a few years back - was a massive break in our history, and a big reason for our unique course. There is much to ponder on that.
I have a friend a retired bishop. He once wrote a blog post on ‘all the church things that people blame the current state of the world on’. When I told him that he’d missed out my favourite/ The Great Schism - he replied‘What’s that?’ So you’re not in bad company
I’ve been a Christian from birth but only 20 years ago began to wake up to Orthodoxy.
BTW Paul - in answer to your question 'What does Progress want?', I suggest a very simple answer - 'More'. It is indeed the insatiable Spirit of Moloch. As a priest I hear everywhere the unspoken question, 'why is it never enough?'. Two further references and then I'll return to my contemplation :-) First have you come across Scott Alexander's extended 'Meditation on Moloch'? Worth a look in this regard. Second - Progress - The Timbered Choir by Wendell Berry . . . The pursuit of 'The objective' is a journey form nowhere to nowhere. There are no reference points - every love unloved etc. Blessings on your day!
This is all very cerebral analysis. Simplifying the various strains of emphasis: philosophy, technology, art, harmony vs power/discontinuity, organic relationship-- can we include the commons and community into right relationship and organic techniques such as permaculture and biomimicry to reunite humanity to its place in snd of nature. This is true art in living, orientation to the ground of being and it’s highest expression on earth. As we continue to destroy the nature of things we get further and further from the unitive and cooperative ways that is creation. There are ways to offer and express these principles that number to infinity and keep our humanity intact
"This is all very cerebral analysis."
Analysis often is cerebral.
"reunite humanity to its place in snd of nature."
From a Buddhist standpoint, humanity is already united with its place in nature. The problem is that people forget this fact, and then undertake efforts at reunification, which fail since you can sew back on a finger that has not been severed. The first step of the Noble Eightfold Path is Right View, and all that is needed is a grounding in it and the subsequent path, and the unity that already exists will become apparent.
"As we continue to destroy the nature of things we get further and further from the unitive and cooperative ways that is creation."
Because people valorize self and desire fulfillment.
Yes indeed, a dangerous turn away from cooperation with our world and its abundance, a part of the whole or holy, as opposed to apart from the whole, alienated, frantic, and competitive
I agree. The birth of christianity was a revolution and that revolutionary zeal to spread the word created endless stream of standard bearers for change from the crusaders and Protestants to modern day islamists and I suppose environmentalists and technologists. Everyone needs a cause to rally round and it all started with Christianity and the requirement to go out and bear witness. It’s a namshub
Another gut punch.
Yesterday, I was thinking about a curious trend in higher education. I'm a college instructor, but I also help chair our school's assessment committee, so I had to attend an assessment conference this past fall. I only had time for 5 or so sessions, but in at least 3 of them (maybe it was even 4!) the idea of either "assessing spiritual wellness" or "promoting loving action" to our students came up, sometimes just as an off-hand comment, sometimes as a more developed theme. This seemed absolutely bizarre to me and I couldn't make sense of it.
Since then, I've seen this idea of "love" in higher ed come up a few times. A couple weeks ago, I was in a meeting and a participant mentioned the idea of "loving students across the finish line" (in a conversation about student success and graduation rates). Just yesterday I was watching a Youtube conversation with two major figures in my field talking about the idea of "love as praxis" in course design. The concept of "love" is becoming the trendy new higher ed thing, and it's weird! And it jives pretty well with what you're discussing here--the transcendent being co-opted by the worldly institutions. College as the new church, where you don't just learn an academic discipline but also learn to "love" (and are maybe even asked to self-assess spiritual wellness???) Perhaps the culture of higher ed wants to replace religion with itself. I don't want to jump to conclusions, and I imagine the intentions of the people espousing this are good (i.e. they want the best for students), but...there is something sinister behind it, it seems to me.
This hits home for me because I also work in education and am trying to discover ways to bring more story, poetry, and imagination into schools. The problem with this, is that most schools—being essentially products of this 'machine-minded' phenomenon that Paul has been outlining so carefully over the past few years—is that the school, or institution, tends to either absorb and trivialize attempts to incorporate into it anything resembling a grass-roots community based culture of care, or is actively hostile toward such methods. I've had conversations with friends, sharing accounts that were similar from other contexts, i.e. everywhere from corporations to national healthcare workers, all of whom seemed equally exhausted by the prospect of reform. I agree with Paul that the answer to the machine is essentially one rooted in the transcendent. However, I've begun to grow more and more skeptical of my own inclination to try and bring something of that experience back into institutions that are clearly eating their own tails and getting into all sorts of strange contortions like the ones you've described above and which I've also witnessed. My sense is that the truly resilient communities of the coming years, acting as forces of gentle resistance to this corrosive trend.. will by necessity be grounded in the tried and true; the pathways to the divine that are well walked and well marked. Vague pronouncements of 'love' and 'growth mindset', etc.. work in the corporate sphere precisely because they are so vague, not rooted in a real tradition and strike me as yet more examples of shapeshifting 'liquid' modernity. Isn't it ironic that the origin of the University system was originally grounded in the Church—Universities adorned with Latin mottos and maxims, few today can even read? It's no wonder that University campuses are ground-zero today for the push and pull of the so-called culture war. It brings me back to the old question of whether or not to work for reform within the system, or start over once again small and humble beyond the pale.
Really insightful comment, thank you! Your observation about the origin of universities coming "full circle" to some extent is so interesting. It seems there are new school systems in development that are trying to "start over once again," and those would be the sort of "classical academy" model that I see popping up everywhere. I understand the impulse, but I'm skeptical of these, too, as they often seem to be run by/promote a sort of reactionary "cultural warrior" ethos which is also a significant problem, IMO. But it's no accident that they are teaching their students Latin, Greek, logic, rhetoric, etc, because those formed the foundations of western education, as you indicate above. And I guess I don't necessarily have a problem with teaching those things in that manner--but I wonder to what extent the appeal to this education system is "my kid is so smart and exclusive--he knows LATIN!"
Read the Benedict Option by Rod Dreher…regarding precisely your question of small community vs . The current system…
"Love" is to modern academia what water is to bottled water--a free-flowing gift to all of us that existed for eternity without any need for a sales pitch turned into a packaged product that quickly makes its user forget all about the real thing.
Really interesting. I wonder also if the claim of “loving” students acts as cover for standards to be lowered: if you (are pretending to) “love” your students, it’s hard to fail them - especially if the “love” is in fact mere sentimentality, which it is. Real love will raise standards and encourage students to stretch themselves. After all, how much interest do these teachers show in the kids once they leave?
Precisely. Learning Latin is great! But without humility, prayer, ascetic practice.. it becomes as you suggest, swallowed by the market of personal “fulfillment”. I mean even in Plato’s day, they were constantly arguing if you could actually instruct someone to “be a good person”. Socrate’s main critique was that you couldn’t trust people (Sophists) who accepted payment, claiming to churn out model statesmen...
Paul - have you read Iain McGilchrist or encountered his ideas around our divided brain, and the subordination of parts of our cognition (contextual, intuitive) by other parts (rational, instrumental) and how this might tie into your ideas around the Machine?
I am early in my exploration of both his ideas and yours, but I would love to see you two in conversation.
Of "The Master and His Emissary" fame? Agreed!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary
That's right - I have a dream of taking a vacation and curling up next to a fireplace while reading a nice hardcover of his newer series, The Matter With Things! On my ever expanding reading list...
People always ask me this! Yes, I think he's a very important voice on these issues. I think the Machine is very much a product of the Emissary's rebellion. Perhaps the Machine is the Emissary himself, made manifest.
The postmodern emphasis on narrative can sometimes be overdone. Yet it usually is the best story that wins. Not always the deepest story, but the one told in the most compelling way. An often fine distinction, I admit. This is why I am often down on the para-scholarly mode ("left brain" narrative) I habitually fall into. It is far more conducive to the glazing of eyes than changing of hearts.
The Master and His Emissary tells us why that is--and now The Matter with Things. The question I have is about my own capacity to absorb it all and not reduce it down to the para-scholarly or the merely ideological. We are asking a lot of ourselves here.
This is a massive undertaking, and it isn't a reach to say we all feel the pressure of time...because something is closing in. Something palpable, ominous but all too slippery to pin down. If I fall into machine modes to oppose the machine the monster only grows. It is daunting, sometimes terrifying, but also exciting and potentially joyful.
The Abbey is a strange attractor in the these chaotic times for those drawn, realistically or not, to this massive project, or certainly one such. A project that isn't only intellectual, or even mostly so, but a radical transformation of our hearts. This is what gives me hope.
Hollywood is the P.R. machine of the Machine.
How can we react in non machine modes?
Personally I have started to try to focus on the beam in my own eye, as Jesus said, and show the truth to others via my actions. But it doesn't feel like it's enough.
I was saying "Yes! Yes!" practically throughout.
I have been working intensively with the book of the prophet Isaiah, and the commonality of insight is very great. (This will result in a series of poem - commentaries to be published, one each day, for the month of June. If you're interested, email randompoet52@gmail.com. Here as examples are the prefaratory piece https://1drv.ms/w/s!Ak-ZGUK4cysygeUW1if_a7LrCz17Rg and a specimen https://1drv.ms/w/s!Ak-ZGUK4cysygeVKGmVzdkOJEsfqwg 0 )
The point is that Isaiah himself lived through a very similar time to the one described here. He struggles to plot a way through over some 40 years, trying to find a way to allevate or delay the coming disaster. This is the closest section to the analysis we've been reading for the last year. It ends with the final disaster looming.
From about the two-thirds point of the book, the focus changes, and the writing is some 100-150 years later, from the community of First Isaiah's followers. The questions now are, for sixteen chapters, when there's an opportunity to start again, how do recognise it and how to we take it? And then, a few years after that, it becomes, how do we avoid making the same mistakes again?
People may recall that my purpose in being here is to help answer the question, "How can I live well and tell good news stories in post-industrial West Yorkshire?" My thought is that some of the stories from the (generally unsuccessful) attempts to build a renewed society after the Exile in Babylon had ended might throw light on what to try and what to avoid now: offer something positive as well as negative in the criticism of Kelly, Zuckerberg et al.
PS Content advisory: I try my hardest not to be sectarian on here, but my Christian worldview is fully on display in those poems.
This is exactly why I pay for a subscription, this was perhaps one of your best pieces of writing Paul, and laid out a lot of the problems facing modern society in a general abstract way. It reminded me a lot of Scott Alexander's essay on Moloch, which also turned me onto his substack as well.
Transcendence is, of course, the problem and that we now are told from a very early age that transcendence is stupid and it cannot occur. Either by our parents, by our teachers, or what I see most of all, by our friends. The problem that faces us and that both Moloch and the Anti-Christ represent is the issue of unabashed materialism. A few months ago, I was sitting in church and the Gospel reading was from Mark, Jesus and the Rich Young Man. That reading resonated with me a great deal that day, because it gets to the very core of what is wrong with our society, both back in the ancient world and especially now. We have to give up our possessions, but we have built a society around acquiring 'thing' after 'thing.' David Bentley Hart argued that this is what made Christ so radical, because when he says to give up your possessions and follow, He means it. He doesn't mean, give up some of your possessions, or give up a few things and volunteer more, all those things are good, but it truly means to give up your life and follow.
I think this is why so many people despise monks. We either exoticize them in the Buddhist tradition, or laugh at them in the Christian tradition, because we could never even dream of doing what they have done. Dedicate their life to poverty.
There have been, of course, other paths throughout time. I think about Punk Rock in the 70s and 80s, that had band members eating out of garbage cans, and truly throwing away the materialist side of society. But today, much like Guy Debord would write in his work on the Society of Spectacle, this is just a shadow image now. A symbol without meaning. Of people going to concerts to get their badges and showing off their credentials instead of living a distinct lifestyle. Monks, you could say, have not abandoned that tradition.
It is a slow process for me and every day I struggle greatly with faith. Trying to find more strength in the church, and to give more back to my community, with the hope that one day, that similar to Galahad or Percival, that I will tread on a path that leads to greater understanding, transcendence, and love. But materialism, I fully believe, is the greatest road block to that path.
Something further is that we need to rediscover how to die. So much of materialism and then transhumanism postulates this silly idea that we will live forever, that we will enjoy the fruits of our vast wealth forever, but we won't. We no longer die in the home, instead perishing hooked up to massive machinery, trying to squeeze more rotten life out of us. Learning how to die nobly again I think would be a big step in the confrontation with Moloch.
I too thought of that Scott Alexander essay. It was the first time I'd read that Ginsberg poem.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
I agree about dying. Without transcendence death is abhorrent... so they long for this silly story about living forever, but for people of faith it should be different.
I would like to think that what you're feeling is the beginning of the end of the profoundly anti-human theo-technology of "americanization."Some of its more devoted apostles (eg, Walter Russell Mead) do demand (and in these exact words) a permanent revolution. Nevertheless, "it is history that teaches us to hope," as Genl Robert E Lee said. And I personally am profoundly hopeful. It's analogous, perhaps, to the end of the Soviet regime in Russia, when people simply stopped believing the lies. I do not think they are as powerful as they think they are, either.
This essay seems to me like a condensed and updated version of the book 'Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age' by Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose. The book is one chapter of what was intended to be a monumental book titled 'The Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Man'. Rose (who earlier in his life had known and followed Alan Ginsberg and the other Beat poets) began writing it in 1962 but afterwards gave up the project eventually becoming an Orthodox monk in the hills of northern California. This book really blew my mind with its perceptiveness when I first read it - highly recommended.
I'm actually planning to write about Fr Seraphim later in the series, and especially his ideas about what 'the religion of the future' will look like. He's a deeply important figure for modern people I think, and will become more so as the Machine advances.
This one has left me stunned.
Where you see the fearsome approach of the machine, I see a machine in decline. Its story is less energetic every year. More and more people escape its narrative. Shelves are empty, communication networks degrade, more police is hired to delay the inevitable.
The West is dying, long live the East.
I'm not sure they necessary conflict. I wrote before (somewhere here) about the future being a likely combination of breakdown and clampdown. I think the Machine is hitting limits everywhere, and we can see it more clearly each day. But I see it tightening its grip in response.
But your last line will probably be prescient.
The death throes of The Machine will do a lot of damage...
Has done, is doing, and will do tremendous damage.
yes, very, very true
The east? As in China? China will collapse sooner than the West. Modern Chinese political life is merely the excrescence of European materialist theories combined with Confucian authoritarianism and mindless nationalism. A horrible brew which deserves to fall, the sooner the better.
I agree with your writing and outlook. It really hits home and puts to words a lot of what I feel. But what to do? How to resist? The only way I have found sanity and a modicum of understanding it to getting back to the patterns of nature. Eating seasonally and suffering through the boom years and celebrating on the years of a big harvest. This year is a bust year for my blueberries. Of course I am not off the grid but I am a bit removed from total dependence. I am unplugged in a lot of ways. I don't have a smart phone so when I am somewhere I am just there. The call of the screen is not always pulling me away from the real world. The most important thing is that I am a Orthodox Traditionalist Anglican. Daily I try to follow our lectionary and pray at least one of the daily offices. There is nothing better and it keeps us on the real and focused on things past the immediate.
These are the big questions. Sounds like we ahve similar situations. I will be dedicating the third part of my series here to thinking about them, so it won't all be just staring into the abyss. I'm looking forward to it myself.
Even now I don't think I am resisting but I am only treading water. I am always trying to find ways to protect my children from this false life they are offered. Most people I see, even the successful ones, appear to have what I call the scream about them. The scream is your mind and body being sucked into the modern world and it is trapped. Even when appearing happy they have a glitch in them. Their inner self or soul is screaming to resist but they can't. Instead they give into the latest health fad, work out fad, trying to stay ever young, the next big vacation and seeing the world, or a get away to nature with the obligatory deep thinking pic.
Someone said to me recently that things like praying the daily offices can be seen as part of "stacking" your life. I like that imagery a lot, stacking the daily routine with practices that turn us towards God, making ever less and less room for the things that turn us away from him.
“Hast thou considered one who takes his caprice as his god, God having led him astray knowingly, and sealed his hearing and his heart and placed a cover upon his sight? Who, then, will guide him after God? Will you not, then, remember?” (45:23)
The above verse, from the Quran, describes liberalism quite presciently, as the worldview that results from our choice to forget God, a feat that Satan had promised to accomplish (12:42). In response, God decreed that we will be forgotten: “And be not like those who forget God, such that He makes them forget their souls. It is they who are the iniquitous.” (59:19).
We are lost souls, lonely souls, and you Paul, God bless you, can see the light. Thank you for your thoughts and words.